Evaluate Your Marketing Plan
Are you doing too much? Make a map.
At the start of a new year, it’s tempting to tackle everything on your marketing wish list. However, if you exceed your capacity, you’ll simply generate stress, failure, and watered-down communications. Are your plans too big? Here’s a simple way to decide.
Create a resources map
The first step is to map it all out. Here’s a template to get you started.
On the left, list all the marketing and communications activities you plan to do in the coming months. Across the top, list the resources and people you have available to do them. Then fill in what each effort will take. Make sure you’re being realistic about how much time and money you need to allocate to each item to make it effective.
What you’ll learn
This exercise will identify if you have over committed yourself or anyone on your team, or under budgeted for your activities. If you have, it’s time to bring on more help or remove something from your plans.
Being selective in your choices will have a greater impact than trying to spread yourself thin. For instance, a big social media campaign won’t be successful if you don’t have the staff to regularly monitor and engage in your social media platforms.
Only do what you can do well
When you take time to map out your plans and put real hours and dollars to every effort, it’s amazing how much clearer your marketing strategy becomes. You’ll quickly see what you can or can’t sustain, which can also help with your strategic planning too, (would you like to have bigger social campaigns? Maybe set a goal this year to research consultants to help or audit your existing presence to assess strengths and weaknesses.)
Either way, this exercise will keep you more focused and effective, leading to more realistic plans, better time management, and clearer headway on projects with success ensured by hard data, instead of blind optimism and good intentions.
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